Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Doghouse Riley is an irascible, aged Hoosier with wicked, literate, funny-as-hell acid in his pen. He posts on a wide variety of socio/poli/cultural issues as well as mockingly complaining about his wife henpecking him to complete home improvement projects.

NICE of NBC to make room in its innovative Sunday Night Football halftime show (it's four guys sitting around a table, but...only two of them are ex-jocks! And they aren't all yelling all the time! ) for an Al Michaels taped interview with Pats owner Robert Kraft (opening question: "Bob, did you have any knowledge of this practice before this week?" surprising answer: "Of course I did, Al. I've been directing it for years from my personal nuclear sub. There's just something so exciting about it. I started peeping into girls' restrooms when I was four, you know"). Because god knows in the roughly two hours of football I'd watched to that point--just football, no pre-game, halftime, or Sunday morning analysis type--I'd heard only twenty minutes or so of low-cal apologias for systematic electronic cheating of the remarkably hubristic American sort. In a game! We can no longer expect all our fellow citizens to agree that a game should be played by the rules.

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see the Corporate Apology Kabuki in action every now and then. It reminds us why we have a Fourteenth Amendment.

One of the unexpected insights of old age is this: in a Universe of constant change, the only changes that actually matter to people are the ones which are beneath insignificance. If you buy a new suit, the third time you wear it in public young people will nudge each other and snigger at the ancient relic you've draped yourself in. A supreme non-talent like Ms Spears fumbles and stumbles her way through a lip-sync'd stroll among professional dancers--which aside from her inexplicably fascinating personal life is her one claim to fleeting fame--and the whole country goes out of its collective gourd. Yet the administration runs a Reader's Digest version of Vietnam and gets re-elected in the teeth of it a year-and-a-half later.